Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic FDK: Erased (24/24)

Well, here we are at last, at the end of the story. Thanks for sticking with me through this often bleak tale. Hope you enjoyed it!

Luthor got his comeuppance, for sure! And Lois and Clark got their happy ending.

Great story!

Excellent wrap-up, DC, with two little niggles (which I will mention later).

I'm glad Diana was there with her "magic" Lasso of Truth. Luthor's confession might not be allowed as actual evidence in his trials (yes, plural!), but the whole country and much of the world heard it. The jurors will probably be instructed to disregard it, but there's no way anyone could hear all that and pretend not to have heard. It's too bad Clark's secret got exposed at the same time, but if the public knows that Luthor was the one responsible for Superman's untimely exit from public life, the bulk of opinion will be sympathetic to him. So it worked out very well after all.

Loved GL's batting practice. I wonder if that Lantern-force ball will survive long enough for the kryptonite to enter the sun's gravitational field. If so, it's gone forever, and none of the Kent descendants will be at risk should any of them venture out into local space. If not, well, there's one of your sequel plot bunnies.

I'm happy for the glimpse of Clark's and Lois' home life. They're obviously so thankful for each other that friction between them is kept to a minimum, not to mention their ages (they're both heading for that dreaded half-century mark). And they're fertile together! Yay!

But you're still , DC. Triplets? They're going to have to deal with three super-powered teens at the same time?? Yikes. Normal teens are bad enough - worse than the terrible twos (which won't be a picnic either). I can understand giving them a full set of kids before Lois ages out, but seriously, three at once? Now Lois and Clark are both pretty much home-bound. The scene of Lois and Clark changing and feeding the kids was very sweet, but it's something that will rewind and repeat for a couple of years, not to mention day care, school, athletics (will Superman's kids even be allowed to participate?), dating (I hope they grow into respectful and polite teens or they'll never get decent dates), driver's education and licenses, all the minutia of life that Clark could have avoided. That's niggle #1. Definitely not a deal-breaker, though - it fits into the story flow very well.

Niggle #2: Where's Nigel? Surely he didn't escape justice! Where'd he go? Did he die of unnatural causes? Did he sense the end was near and disappear? Did he turn states' evidence? Inquiring minds want to know!

Very good. The whole thing was tense, from start to finish, with lots of angst and anger and frustration and Luthor (almost) getting away with it. Kerth-nom worthy, for certain. I'm pretty sure I'll toss this one in the kitty.

Don't want to wait for the next one! Post it soon!

Okay, so it's finally posted. Finally the end. I have had so many comments and feedback to hold onto because quite frankly I didn't want to spoil anything along the way.

First of all, you are so evil as a writer when it comes to Clark. Once I think you can't go darker with the torture and then you surprise me. I'm just going to stop assuming there isn't anywhere else you can go because you continue to surprise me. A job well done and yes, this is a very big compliment.

Secondly, how dedicated does Lois Lane have to be to not only continue her search for Clark all these years later but to never settle down and never even attempt to fill the hole she has where her friendship and partnership with Clark resides? No attempt to even find love. I can't help but feel an immense amount of respect and sorrow for her in the years that she lost during her fruitless inquiries that were met with the slamming of closed doors and dead ends for so long. The friendship she forged with Martha is an important one that I'm sure helped her through her grief along the way.

Clark's torture and journey back to the life he once had and the person he had been is a painful and torturous path to go down - both mentally and emotionally. The physical scars he's forced to endure along with the mental scars Lex and Nigel have inflicted on him are enough to make you scream at everything that goes "boo" at night. Not only has Lex found a way to continue and prolong Clark's torture through the years but he still finds a way to continue inflicting harm to Lois whom he now holds as someone unworthy of his greatness.

Clark's journey really is a unique one. He goes from being mute and unable to really show any recognition to his surroundings to suddenly have a break into reality as he finds the ability to speak. Unfortunately, that joy is short lived when he doesn't remember who Lois is. Then he finally remembers who Lois is and who he is but can't remember he is Superman.. Circling back the memories with his anguish over his father, Jonathan's death was very smart. The rush of emotions helped push him to finally remember what happened to him.

Lex Luthor's fall from grace was beautiful and epic as always. My only anguish over it is that he got to one up Clark and reveal him to the world. It gives him too much power in his final moments as he falls from grace. I kinda wish we could somehow make it Clark's decision instead of Lex's to step out of the shadows. But he took it in stride and showed the world why Superman is the man he is.

Happy couple. Happy family. Evil villain rotting away....

All is well!

Great job as always, Vicki!

Beautiful ending. I tend to avoid super dark fics, but this was worth the turmoil, strife, and horrible trials. I do wonder how the world responded to everything exactly after the fact----and when they learned about the triplets :3, but the knowledge that justice won and Clark got what Luthor had sworn to ensure he would never have in the end.... It was glorious.
Thanks for writing ^_^

I enjoyed the ending to the story. Great job.

Thank you, Annie! Glad you enjoyed it!

I DID warn you that I did evil things! But hey, parents of higher order multiples ARE heroes! Especially those without powers to help them. But, who knows? The kids might have 3 VERY different personalities. With my twins, one became a three-nager at a year old and the other remained completely chill (was chill in the womb too). At 6 1/2, they are still very different - one is very boisterous and outgoing, the other shy and quiet. Check on me in another 6 years as teenagehood starts though. Lois and Clark are in for a heck of a ride though. I can envision all three of those kiddos at four or five years old all piled into just one of their beds. (Mine still sleep over in each other's beds.) As hard as multiples can be, Lois and Clark are in for some super sweet moments and will get to witness an incredible bond. So...maybe I'm not ENTIRELY evil?

Of course Diana knows the confession would be thrown out in court (would that be considered confession under duress?) but hey, it instantly destroyed any defense Luthor might try to mount. I'm sure GL and friends made sure that particular piece of green K is out of reach forever.

Where IS Nigel? Hmmm... I suspect that, like all rats, he knew when to abandon a sinking ship. He's too old to go after Lois and Clark himself and he's too smart to even try to hire an assassin on his own. He's already implicated in Luthor's crimes (off page but you KNOW Luthor is going to throw EVERYONE else under the bus with him). He'll want to lay low and try to disappear from sight. Of course, if the muse gets the urge....well...

Glad you enjoyed the story. Thanks for coming on this dark, twisted ride with me.

Thank you, Val, and for all the beta work on this one!

I love my Evil Writer Membership.

You know, I thought about throwing in a few lines about how Lois did date here and there, as it would be a natural progression in trying to regain some sense of normalcy in her life (Dan Scardino was going to be mentioned, in keeping with canon) but that none of the men could a)compare with Clark, furthering her knowledge that she really DOES love only Clark and b) understand her absolute NEED to keep chasing a ghost after 2 decades. But it just didn't fit without taking away from the story, so it got left on the cutting room floor. In either case, Lois is wholly dedicated to Clark. And it is tragic in any case, simply because she loses over 20 years where she could have been with the man she really loves.

Writing Clark's torture was a lot of fun. (And yes, he's furious at me for saying so.) I've done things to break him in the past, but never as wholly comprehensive as this. Even Assassin Clark from A Reconstructed Life had a drive, a purpose, and a personality. And you just know that even the healed Clark by the end is going to still have that PTSD there in the background - the nights when he still wakes up screaming, those moments of marveling at the little things once taken from him, the moments when it hits him all over again about how much of his life, his family's life, his friends' lives, he missed out on. That will never leave him, and it's especially bad given his neatly flawless memory.

I'm actually kind of perversely proud of Lex's ability to keep harming Clark up to the bitter end. Because of course he would. And, in typical Lex fashion, it comes back around to kick him in the teeth.

Thank you, Blue! Glad you enjoyed the story. I'm sure Lois and Clark are doing their best to maintain what privacy they can, but of course that won't be much. Hopefully most people would be happy for the couple and their kids.

Thank you, Sparkyfire! Glad you enjoyed the story. It sure was fun to bring it to you!

Really, really looking forward to the sequel. LOL! I loved the help from the Justice League. How appropriate, a women (Diana) accelerates his downfall. I am grateful that you didn’t simply finish the story prematurely with the “everyone lived happily-ever-after.” But seriously, I am hoping you get started on the sequel in the next couple of weeks. I’m quarantined, and holding out for a hero fix....

I SO wish I had a sequel, or at least another epic, ready, but alas, my muse (despite a lot of poking at her with sharp objects) thinks she also needs to be in quarantine. Mostly because I'm so mentally spent from the homeschool stuff. I've asked her to at least work on some short things, maybe a challenge fic or two. We'll see how it goes.

I was glad to be able to throw in some Diana stuff at the end. Bats might have saved Clark from the asylum, but it's the women in Clark's life who fight the hardest for him - Lois, Martha, and Diana, by getting the rest of the JL to look for him.

So glad you enjoyed the story and I'm hoping I have something new to serve up soon!

Thank you for another awesome story, I really enjoyed it and glad they got their happy ending. Thanks for writing!
Hope you are all staying safe and well in these turbulent times.

Thanks so much! Please stay safe too!

While I can manage to watch a show and remember what has happened in previous episodes, I can't seem to do this with reading. So I waited until your last chapter was posted before continuing past chapter 1. As luck would have it, I wasn't able to devour it then, but finally. FINALLY I have had the opportunity to sit down and binge the whole thing in two days. And boy was it worth it.

Some notes from other parts:

Part 2:

OMG, I am SO glad you said all this. I've been thinking it for 20+ years... Every time I watch this episode with my 12-yr-old son, whom I've trained to be picky about bad physics in shows and movies, we go on and on about this very thing.

Part 4
Your evilness is so inspiring.

Part 6
Again, I've been wondering this for years!!

Part 7
I'm beginning to think that it would be interesting to begin a list of all the horrible things we authors have put Clark through over the years... Poor guy.

Part 15
I love your description of Clark escaping the prison of his brain. Very good!

Part 17
The payphone thing. I love it. I came across a pay phone a year or two ago in the lobby of a hotel that was undergoing some much-needed renovations. We took pictures with our smart phones as we pretended to use it (note: it did actually work, we just didn't call anyone using it).

Part 19
Love the part about the dash on the gravestone. Beautiful!

Part 21
Beginning of the chapter: Okay, now I can stop waiting for the ball to drop.
End of the chapter: Whew that was rough, I mean all those chapters I was just waiting for the next horrible thing and then they went on the date and I was sure it was going to never happen or get ruined. But they made it, it was sweet, and it wasn't ruined till the end. Thanks for that.

Part 22
Beginning of the chapter: I sincerely hope that was Lex Lois just beat up.
Later in the chapter: Darn, that would have been satisfying.
(Side note: I wrote this: "And I think I'm going to look into making my own " -- I must have been distracted. I have no idea what I was thinking)

Part 23
Hmm... single eyebrow raised. All this good stuff. When is the band-aid going to be ripped off? What horrible demise awaits them? Because that's what I've grown to expect from your stories, well not all of them, but the warning... I'm sitting here reading the beautiful proposal and wedding while biting my fingernails. Seriously, when are you going to pull the rug out from under my happiness?

Part 24
"Oh, she's got the lasso out. Things just got really interesting."
There ought to be a Kerth category for best line.


Finally, thank you for answering my question about the nature of these broken things in your warning in the first chapter. You said the you believed the ending was "satisfying," but given your evil tendencies, I was worried that we might not agree on what constitutes a satisfying ending... But now that I've seen it, I'm totally satisfied!! I loved it (well except for the torture part, that was rough...)! Excellent story!

Hi Jelly!

Glad you enjoyed the story! It was a blast to write and I'm so glad the darkness didn't turn people away. And I appreciate that you liked my little nitpicks of the cummerbund and Bat Signal. The signal thing has bothered me for a long time. (Gotham must live in a mystical land of perpetual fog and clouds.)

I had to laugh at the payphone thing. My husband and I took a little weekend vacation 3 summers ago for our 10th anniversary, sans kiddos, and saw a payphone in the shopping center near our hotel. We had to take a pic and called it an ancient artifact. Made me wonder at what point it became common to NOT see them around. Seemed like they were abundant in one moment and gone the next. Ah, the wonders of getting lost in new technology.

As for the dash thing...I've seen it a few times before. But the first time I read about it was when I got the Letters From The Labyrinth cd from the Trans Siberian Orchestra. They always have a story that corresponds to the songs and part of it was about a class that is making etchings of gravestones. The start discussing the dash between the dates and how it represents an entire life, and isn't just a divider between the birth and death dates. It was a really, really powerful explanation that stuck with me.

Glad you liked the lasso line. I really liked The Flash in the JL cartoon when I watched it with my girls a couple of years back. It felt just so right for Barry to say!

Thanks again for reading!